That said, the people on Diego Garcia must have some idea of what happened to the plane.
If the plane had had enough fuel to get to one of the thousands of islands making up the Philippines, I’d say that’s where it is. The islands have a big, vicious Muslim attack population, supposedly AQ has made inroads there, “Operation Bojinka” was to be coordinated through the Philippines, they had a big plan to kill the Pope on his visit there, it was visited by McVeigh and his buddy (who was married to a Filipina whose family lived in the same building as or possibly were even related to one of the people building explosives to kill the Pope), getting in and out of the US from the Philippines is easy - and the country is pretty dysfunctional right now. Not quite a failed state, but one with a lot of problems.
But I don’t think the plane had enough fuel. Beijing (its original destination) is a lot closer.It's my read that the plane is at the bottom of the ocean. If it WEREN'T someONE someWHERE would have already spotted and reported it.
Who knows, someone may yet surface who SPOKE by phone to one of the passengers "going down." Shades of 911.
I can’t believe it’s at the bottom of the ocean, although it’s possible that it dove straight down in shallow water and is embedded in sand somewhere, hence, no debris.
It’s possible that the hijackers were flying it somewhere (since now it appears that there were two systems that were disabled, successively) and it ran out of fuel.